Well, Christmas was almost a month ago. So maybe I'm a bit late. Maybe not. Who cares? Not I. So I got some stuff, blah blah blah, you're not interested. I did, though, get some good books. A couple of Tim Sandlin novels. Great books, in that comedy-novel genre, but I'm through them by now. I got "House of Leaves," by Mark Z, Danielewski. Haven't read more than the introduction, but so far, i think this could turn out to be the weirdest book I've ever read. What kind of a *novel* has a 40 page index in the back? Weird. Anyway, I had mentioned to my mom and step-dad that I'm going to try to go back to school come the spring term. And that I wanted to branch out from the audio/video production type program I used to be in, that I wanted to go for some kind of computer science degree. So they got me a couple of beginner level Java programming books.

So today, I started into the first of them. I've made it through a few (well, 8, actually) of the 24 lessons in this book, and I have to say, I've impressed myself with how well I'm comprehending it all. I mean, other than playing around with BASIC back in elementary school, I've got literally no experience with any of this. I guess I do spend an awful lot of time on the interwebs using other people's Java programs, but starting from scratch is all new to me.

So far, it's all been text-based, writing short programs to display text from a command prompt or terminal. Just kind of getting the hang of some of these keywords and commands. I've got 4 chapters of objects to get through next, then finally some programs with a visual output. I can't wait.